I tell Mimi I’m sorry, that I’m not feeling all that well, that I’m tired, that I’m not comfortable in foreign places, that I don’t do well when I’m not at home. These are excuses that I’ve used so many times, they feel like amiable ruts in a hard road.

“Are you unhappy with me?” says Mimi. “With our lives?”

Tell her the truth, says Eugene. Tell her you hate yourself and what you’ve become.

“Because I’m not unhappy with our lives.” Mimi is crying now. Softly, so you wouldn’t notice unless you looked. “I just wish you weren’t so miserable.”

Tell her you’ve become a Bear.

“What do you believe in, Bird? Is there anything left that you believe in?”

ALL THE WAY BACK from Amsterdam’s red-light district, I went over my choice of sex worker. I told myself I should have picked the brunette in the green leotards, or the woman with the short black hair and the tattoo of a rose on her shoulder.

As though there were a right choice in the first place, and I was annoyed with Mimi for making me choose.

Mimi didn’t say anything until we got to Dam Square. “That was disappointing.”

“What?”

“The brothels. I thought the women had their own apartments. I thought they were in control of their space and their bodies.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“I thought they lived normal lives. Normal women. Doing normal things. Watching television. Ironing. Washing dishes. Sitting in their living rooms with the blinds open. With a dog or a cat. And every so often, when they felt like it, they had sex for money.”

There was a young man at the far side of the square with a didgeridoo. He was playing a rhythmic piece that had nothing in common with American show tunes.

“But those places were cages. A room with a door. A hole in the wall. A zoo for men.”

I thought about the lectures on the sex trade that we could have attended. Perhaps, if we had gone to one, Mimi would have been able to ask questions, and maybe if she had heard the women talking about how they lived their lives, she’d have felt better.

Maybe they did have pets.

WE FIND TRAM 91 and take it to the park. When we get there, we start walking.

“Are there sights we’re supposed to see?”

“There are,” says Mimi, but she doesn’t stop, and she doesn’t look at the guidebook. “There are always sights to see.”

We walk past something that looks a bit like a church but turns out to be a planetarium. I’m not feeling much better, but I’m optimistic that the fresh air will help.

Prague is currently under a smog advisory. Kitty holds up her cellphone. Respiratory disease and heart problems.